(HealthDay News) — Strict regulation of electronic cigarettes isn’t warranted based on current evidence, a team of researchers says.

On the contrary, allowing e-cigarettes to compete with regular cigarettes might cut tobacco-related deaths and illness, the researchers concluded after reviewing 81 prior studies on the use and safety of the nicotine-emitting devices.

“Current evidence suggests that there is a potential for smokers to reduce their health risks if electronic cigarettes are used in place of tobacco cigarettes and are considered a step toward ending all tobacco and nicotine use,” said study researcher Thomas Eissenberg, co-director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

The Food and Drug Administration can’t use an advisory panel’s 2011 report on menthol cigarettes because its members had conflicts of interest, a federal judge ruled Monday.

While the agency has since conducted an independent review on the public health impact of menthol cigarettes, the ruling could hinder the FDA’s ability to defend any future regulation of the minty smokes.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon in Washington ordered the FDA on Monday to reconstitute the tobacco panel and barred the agency from using its older report on menthol cigarettes.

Briant offers an insider’s view of taxes, regulations and restrictions

It could be 2016 before the FDA takes official control over cigars, pipe tobacco and e-cigarettes. In the meantime, myriad proposals, from President Obama’s near-doubling of the Federal Excise Tax to local and state initiatives to increase tobacco taxes and restrict the sale of e-cigs, should keep the country’s 175,000 sellers of tobacco products on alert.

***

“Even if they issued these proposed regulations tomorrow, it could be at least two years before they would go into effect.”

Research financed by the US Food and Drug Administration is going to give a more detailed insight into the use of cigarettes and help determine the associated risks, with a view to preventing addiction among Americans.

One team of researchers is counting the puffs taken by volunteer “vapers,” while another is occupied with scanning Facebook for posts on how people attempt to make e-cigarettes deliver extra nicotine. A third team is building a virtual convenience store for 13-17-year-olds, in order to measure how displays and price promotions influence the monors’ shopping choices.

Publisher’s Note: The publisher of this website was instrumental in the initiation of centralized regulatory review in the White Office of Management and Budget– its origins having begun in the Johnson Administration and utilized by eight subsequent Presidential Administrations.

A plethora of press articles are coming on line in the last eight hours which cast the OMB review in a non-favorable light. I remind all our readers that the office in OMB, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, consisting of less than four dozen employees out of a million plus federal employees is the only group between an unchecked regulatory bureaucracy and the taxpayers check book.